Needless to say (don’t you love that expression?), I love cool technology.  I’ve learned that technology-for-technology’s-sake is usually a bad idea, especially when delivering a production-ready solution for a client, but today I’d like to talk about a couple of simple, yet amazing solutions I’ve come across recently.  I’ve always enjoyed helping people, especially those that really need it.  Nothing is cooler than solving a problem that helps improve someone’s life or alleviates their frustration…

I spend a fair amount of time in the technology sections of reddit, particularly the web developer and technology areas.  One of the cool things about the web dev area is that you always have people posting either “For Hire” or “Now Hiring” stuff there.  Seems like there are always matches if you read through the replies.  I realized today that somebody created a bot that scrapes keywords from the “For Hire” posts and tries to match them to the “Now Hiring” posts.  Pretty doggone slick.  I’ve seen it result in several people getting hired.  How cool is that?  Not sure if it does it in the other direction (Letting hiring managers know about For Hire people automatically), but I wouldn’t be surprised.  A simple hack that has probably affected many lives for the positive?

As my dad would say: “Slick!”

Also, I’ve been hacking around a little more deeply with a Raspberry Pi and an Arduino, as I’ve got a client interested in using single board computers to power some of the amazing prototypes they build.  It’s an amazing way to marry the hardware (servo motor, pressure switches, mechanical devices) with software running simple applications that control the hardware.  These things are super flexible and if you have any interest in building machines, I’d highly recommend checking them out.  By the way, the Raspberry Pi sells for under $30 and the Arduino is less than $20.  

Chalk this up to another one of those: “Boy, if I had this when I was a kid…” things.